Building a great yearbook company

Wow… what a busy start to the 2011-2012 academic year! We’re now over half way into November and things are already starting to get really busy.

Our team continues to grow. We’re now up to 8 full-time permanent yearbook-gurus, and during the ultra-busy period of the year our team swells to nearer 15. Strangely, whenever we employ new people, we always manage to get a name clash. We’ve now had or have: 2 x Chris, 2 x Alex, 2 x Tom and 2 x Jam(ie|ey).

So how well are we doing? Well, last academic year we grew strongly again, creating yearbooks for over 450 different schools, colleges, universities and other groups across the UK and beyond. That’s about 50,000 yearbooks in just one year. We don’t know for sure, but we think that makes us the UK’s number one yearbook supplier now in terms of numbers, or at least very close to it.

We also think we’re the most efficient yearbook supplier, in that we have the smallest head count per customer served. This is really important, as it means we can be really competitive on price. What this doesn’t mean, however, is that your books are of a lower quality with us – we simply invest a lot of time, money and energy in improving our system so it does as much of the boring and time consuming work for us (and for you too).

So where do we go from here? Well, we want to do better still. We’re well into development now of an ultra-secret super-duper new yearbook system which we think will bring huge benefits for our customers whilst also continuing to decrease the amount of boring work we need to do per customer. This basically means you get a higher quality books, creating it in a simpler way, without the price going up. That’s a win win situation.

We hope to launch a beta version of our new system to a select number of customers at some point later in this academic year. Presuming all goes well, we’ll roll it out to all our customers in the next academic year, 2012-2013.